Reading: Jeannie, a love story

9 March 2023

I had come to the last book of Jeannie, which I imagine that Derek wrote as a way to process his grief; it was published a year after the previous book, instead of the usual two years. It was somewhat longer than the other books and was comforting in that most of it was about their last year together, along with the usual memories of their past life in sophisticated London.

Some light was cast from reading, over a week later, a biographical essay by John Nash in a book called The Minack Chronicles Revisited (which includes a fiftieth anniversary reprint of the first Minack book, A Gull on the Roof)….It was Jeannie’s memoir of her years as publicist for the Savoy Hotel (Meet Me at the Savoy) that brought much needed money to the Tangyes, money that paid for the digging of their water well.

Some favourite passages and the thoughts they inspired:

I loved how kind she was to the visitors who found their way to Minack cottage.

It had become clear to me as the books progressed that the deaths of their many friends during the war (like one man who said to Jeannie, looking out the window of her office at the Savoy before his next flight over Germany, that he knew he wasn’t coming back this time) had a lot to do with their desire for a quiet country life.

In the scene below, I would be Jeannie, talking about Long Beach, and Derek would be Allan, saying we can’t keep doing this forever just so tourists won’t be disappointed. (The Scillonian was the ship that took folks to the Isles of Scilly.)

But the joy of making passersby happy keeps me going.

(Derek shared some correspondence with an Irish writer named John Stewart Collis, I added another book, While Following the Plough, to my list of obscure (on this side of the pond) books. Collis was popular enough at the time to have a biography written about him. My budget is going almost as much to books as to plants this year.)

Jeannie often said to Derek, “Aren’t we lucky!” She knew that they had been fortunate to make the move to Cornwall while it was still affordable.

It is the same about moving to the coastal community on the Long Beach Peninsula; it has become unaffordable for many people to either buy or rent. I made the decision to move here in 1992 and be a gardener at the same age, 38, that Derek was when he and Jeannie left London. I did it just in time, while it was still affordable here. I didn’t find their kind of a dream home, though. It would not have existed at any time here, since any view of the beach would include vehicles using it as a highway. I pondered whether anywhere in Washington would have a place with as much privacy as they had, and thought no, not without a million dollars. Then I remembered Markham Farm, which does have that peace and privacy and non-driving beach that Minack offered, and which was acquired “in time”.

Jeannie contains two pages of excerpts from their gardening diary, back when potatoes were their second main crop. OH how I wish someone would just publish a book of these diaries:

Jeannie never faltered in their mission even when they didn’t have money for even a postage stamp.

I share Derek’s thoughts about Prince Charles, in this story about the cats having saved the tulip planting from being eaten by mice.

Also speaking of fey eccentricity, I think Derek and Jeannie would have enjoyed the “cottagecore” movement on, say, instagram (even though Derek had such a thing against “the computer age” even back in the 60s). Minack would not have been such a quiet existence with social media and Google earth; back then, followers had to make a real effort to find it.

I love Jeannie’s view of what the nature reserve they had managed to acquire next door should be like: NOT a place for tour groups and busy sightseers.

I wish I had Jeannie to help me save the frog bog next door to us. (And I do think nature programs can make us feel; Springwatch, and Autumn and Winterwatch definitely inspire emotion.)

After the description of a very good year, came the inevitable for any reader who had done some reading outside of the books. I knew it was Jeannie’s last year. Biographer John Nash suggests in The Minack Chronicles Revisited that Derek might have been in denial about her illness, and indeed, he describes being shocked when doctors said to him that he was about to experience a terrible blow. I think maybe Jeannie knew more than she told him, because the way she handled it is the way I think I would.

I could hardly bear the rest of it, which Derek handled by simply sharing his diary entries from those weeks.

Their neighbour, David (John Le Carre) wrote the eulogy for her funeral.

Jeannie’s ashes, and later Derek’s, were placed in the Honeysuckle Meadow, part of Oliverland. Derek had described it earlier in the book.

When I came to the end, with a deluge of tears sliding down, I found taped into the back cover of the book the obituary written by David after Derek himself died ten years later. I had been unsuccessful at finding it online, so thank you so much to whoever owned this book before me.

Now I have but three more books, the ones that must be the saddest, the years without Jeannie.

photo from the wonderful website, MinackInfo.